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Monday, August 18, 2008

$10 million for complexity theory...

Via His Quantum Holiness, news comes of the NSF Expeditions awards: each award is $10 million, and four were given out. One of them was for complexity theory, and the team is a star-studded list of complexity and algorithms folks, led by Sanjeev Arora. Here's the blurb:

In their Expedition to Understand, Cope with, and Benefit From Intractability, Sanjeev Arora and his collaborators at Princeton University, Rutgers University, New York University and the Institute for Advanced Study will attack some of the deepest and hardest problems in computer science, striving to bridge fundamental gaps in our understanding about the power and limits of efficient algorithms. Computational intractability, a concept that permeates science, mathematics and engineering, limits our ability to understand nature or to design systems. The PIs hope to better understand the boundary between the tractable and the intractable. This has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of algorithmic processes in a host of disciplines and to cast new light on fields such as quantum computing, secure cryptography and pseudorandomness. The research team plans to draw on ideas from diverse fields including algorithms, complexity, cryptography, analysis, geometry, combinatorics and quantum mechanics

Congratulations ! For getting the award, and demonstrating that hard-core complexity theory CAN get funded...